Among the Intellectualoids / Antinuclear Malpractice
Beckmann, Petr
AMONG THE INTELLECTUALOIDS ANTINUCLEAR MALPRACTICE by Petr Beckmann Though the media moguls would have us think otherwise, there is a strong case to be made for nuclear power on moral...
...Last year she decided to shift the emphasis of her harangues from antinuclear to anti-defense causes, at a time when such a change was being recommended by the radical umbrella organization Mobilization for Survival and by the leftwingers' nerve center, the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington...
...the first table above is, in fact, taken from the AMA report...
...These amounts range, respectively, from some 3,000 times to a million times more micro-curies than are released by the radioactive iodine in a pint of milk after an emergency has been declared...
...The noisy jabber about the "Soviet threat" begins every time the Pentagon adopts a new system of mass annihilation into its arsenal...
...The bitter irony of their attitude is that it should be an argument for nuclear power, not against it...
...Now Wald is indeed a Harvard professor (of biology) and a winner of a Nobel Prize (in the utterly unrelated field of color vision and physiology of the retina...
...The California Medical Asso* P. Beckmann, The Health Hazards of Not Going Nuclear, $5.95 from Golem Press, Box 1342, Boulder, CO 80306...
...International standards recommend that action be taken (e.g., dairy cattle be put on dry feed) when the radiation of iodine in the milk exceeds about 0.03 microcuries per pint...
...they just don't get the same publicity as Jane Fonda's lectures on public health...
...In response to a challenge recently posed by Arizona physician Dr...
...Sidney Wolf of Ralph Nader's Health Research Group, who finds antinuclear alarm-ism more important than protecting people's lives from fires-he condemns smoke detectors using "dangerous radioactivity," though if he wore one on top of a dunce's hat, it would give him a smaller dose than he gets from his own blood...
...what he does not oppose is the use of electricity...
...Here, too, Helen Caldicott may provide an answer...
...and even if opposed to inoculations or surgery on religious grounds, he would usually state his motivation openly without papering over his beliefs with medical arguments...
...the radioiodine given in thyroid examinations to healthy patients amounts to about 100 micro-curies, and up to 30,000 microcuries is given in therapy to patients with cancer of the thyroid...
...He was introduced to his audience as a Harvard professor and Nobel Prize winner in physiology and medicine...
...Gofman's assertion is the old trick of telling the truth, but not the whole truth...
...Caldicott makes frequent appearances on campuses and in women's magazines...
...This is nonsense...
...Of the 100 dogs that had inhaled plutonium, those that had inhaled the equivalent of one milligram were still alive a year later and eventually died of causes other than fibrosis (at the time of the report, six to nine years after exposure, 75 of the 100 dogs were still alive...
...Soviet physicians immediately supported our movement...
...Wald made the statement on TV, standing in front of the Three Mile Island plant in the days when the antinuclear hysteria was being fanned to fever pitch because a nuclear plant had done what it was supposed to do, shut itself down without hurting anybody when its vast power went out of control...
...Then take a look at some of the non-nuclear disasters that have occurred since nuclear electric power first came into existence: Cause of Disaster Place Deaths coal smoke London 1952 3,900 fuel gas explosion Tarragona, Spain 1979 140 oil rig accident North Sea 1980 123 dam failure Vaionte, Italy 1962 2,000 dam failure Morvi, India 1979 3,000 Or consider: There are five dams in the United States, each of which could kill more than 100,000 people on failure (no plutonium needed to blow them up...
...no radiation is safe," she parrots Gof-man's theme, but with an added twist: "If you live in Australia, you sunbathe and you surf...
...At least several hundred scientists trained in the bio-medical aspects of nuclear energy-myself definitely included- are candidates for Nuremberg-type trials for crimes against humanity," concludes Gofman...
...For the moral case for nuclear power is simply this: The price paid in human suffering-in deaths, injuries, diseases, and environmental impact- for a unit of electrical energy is far lower for nuclear power than for any other source of electricity yet invented...
...As for the estimates of the AMA Council of Scientific Affairs on the mortality-risk from generating electricity by various fuels," says Gofman in another of his deeply reasoned arguments, "they are totally worthless...
...23 of them are still alive and in good health, the other two died of unrelated causes-not lung cancer.] • "If a baby drinks milk with radio active idodine in it, it gets absorbed through the gut, goes up the thyroid gland in the neck, where it concen trates, and it irradiates just a few cells, and that child may get thyroid cancer...
...Besides, says he, you are barking up the wrong tree if you suspect him of being a friend of coal...
...but it is one that could be easily, immediately, and devastatingly refuted were it not true...
...Among the merely misleading statements is Dr...
...This kind of doctor, though, would voice his objections in professional meetings and journals, in the course of the normal search and struggle for scientific truth...
...After the almost daily barrage by the antinuclear establishment, this last statement may seem outrageous...
...but of medicine as well: • "We're talking about a substance (plutonium) that is so incrediby toxic that everybody who comes in contact with it and gets it into their lungs will die of lung cancer.'' [In an accident during the World War II Manhattan Project, 25 workers received a high multiple of the permissible plutonium lung burden...
...The American Medical Association asked its Council of Scientific Affairs in 1976 to investigate the relative health hazards of various power sources...
...Plutonium is indeed toxic-a milligram of it is a little more toxic than caffeine, the stimulant in coffee, when ingested, and a little less than naturally occurring radium when inhaled...
...Her move was extolled by no less than Pravda and Izvestiya, those well-known standard bearers in the crusade to abolish all nuclear power plants and all nuclear bombs...
...they just conceal it and evade comparisons...
...But there is perhaps no irony more bitter than when this holder of a medical degree, sworn to her Hippocratic oath, concealer of the re duced health hazards of nuclear power, and disguiser of the deadly Soviet threat, writes in that same article: "I am here to look after people, to save people's lives, not to kill them...
...no human has ever been without radioactivity , so that it is the absence, not the presence, of "a little bit of radioactivity" that would be abnormal...
...AMONG THE INTELLECTUALOIDS ANTINUCLEAR MALPRACTICE by Petr Beckmann Though the media moguls would have us think otherwise, there is a strong case to be made for nuclear power on moral grounds...
...Helen Caldicott, who makes this last point more subtly: "The scientists who work for nuclear power and nuclear energy have sold their soul to the devil...
...Bernard Cohen, professor of physics at the University of Pittsburgh, produced figures to show that Gofman's unfounded estimate of plutonium releases was in error by a factor of more than 10,000, Gofman shot back: "It is more amusing than anything else to see the ranting and raving of a Bernard Cohen...
...Gofman appears to be the only one among our doctors against health who has not totally stonewalled the issue of alternative health hazards, though his attitude on the point only reveals greater irrationality...
...John Gofman's court testimony that "there is no known amount of radioactivity that can be proclaimed safe...
...For as she proclaimed to her Pravda readers: "Nuclear plants are synonymous with nuclear weapons...
...Rat-dzens" is (Rutgens-Dzheffry, Dzheims, or Dzhordzh...
...She has given up watching babies die from the horrible effects of nuclear power at a Boston hospital to become the full-time president of an organization of the radical Left...
...Sun-induced skin cancer is due to ultraviolet radiation, which is non-ionizing and has nothing to do with radioactivity or the cancers caused by it...
...when the health hazards of nuclear power are presented in isolation...
...One may immediately ask: If nuclear power is a significant boon for public health, why do physicians not speak out in favor of it...
...There are good inherent reasons, not just strict regulation, why nuclear power is far safer than any other source of electricity, and the interested reader will find them elsewhere.* My purpose here is to discuss a smaller, related point: the activities of a handful of physicians who, by opposing nuclear power generation, oppose the reduction of health hazards...
...We have received a telegram from President Brezhnev in reply to our appeal to end the arms race...
...And thus stand corrected (or ignored) the world's scientific bodies by this lone voice...
...Nobel Prize winner Wald's data appear to be concocted...
...Khelen Keldikott," to transliterate Pravda's spelling, told Soviet readers last December 1 that: The USA has now accumulated an awesome quantity of nuclear bombs, but the Pentagon continues their production . . . Our politicians have long ago turned into obedient puppets of the military-industrial complex...
...What Gofman does not tell the layman he seeks to intimidate is that he himself is radioactive due to the potassium 40 in his, and everybody else's, blood (he is, in other words, telling us that there is no amount of blood that can be proclaimed safe for its owner...
...Jane Orient, he produced a tedious calculation based on the uranium in coal which overlooked some vital points and essentially proved that for the same power generated, a nuclear plant will (surprise...
...the only experiments on this point were made by the Batelle NW Laboratories in Hanford and published in 1969-70...
...Nevertheless, laymen may well be taken in by seemingly scientific, quantitative statements by a Nobel Prize winner, as when Wald asserts: "Plutonium is perhaps the most toxic substance known-if you were to inhale a milligram, you would be dead of massive fibrosis of the lung within hours...
...When Dr...
...Yet when did you last see any figures on the dead, injured, and diseased per billion megawatt-hours of electric energy, and how were the victims divided among the various fuels...
...Caldicott could have obtained this information from any radiologist, including the one to whom she is married.] • "All radiation is dangerous...
...They are only too willing to oblige...
...for the other antinuclear voices, shrill as they may be, remain silent on this all-important moral issue...
...or Dr...
...It is billions and trillions of times less toxic than some chemical and biological poisons...
...MW) power plant when the entire fuel cycle is considered: Fuel Deaths Disabilities coal 20-300 " 100-300 oil 2-300 90-180 gas 0-2 20 nuclear 1-3 7-40 Unfair...
...They do...
...What, then, is the real point of the campaign against the cleanest and safest method of generating electricity...
...But the physicians at issue here are of a different ilk: They engage in medical activities or voice medical opinions with the authority of a physician, when in fact these activities and opinions are rooted solely in ideology and untested in the accepted forums of medicine and science...
...But because uninformed, these physicians have the good sense not to voice any opinion on the subject and the intelligence, usually, to ask the crucial question "Compared to what...
...They're either dumb, stupid or highly compromised...
...Now a doctor, like anyone else, has a right to be wrong (if, indeed, he is wrong...
...Some of their propaganda is merely misleading...
...All babies drink milk with radioactive iodine in it-there is no other milk...
...There were once doctors vehemently opposed to inoculation a-gainst smallpox, to disinfectants, even to anesthetics...
...in a crowded theater could inflict as much damage as did Professor Wald by his statements at TMI...
...Carl Johnson, Health Officer of Jefferson County, Colorado (where the Rocky Flats weapons plant is located), whose absurd statistics on cancers purportedly caused by plu-tonium had the rare, perhaps unique, distinction of being rebuked by a Carterite EPA...
...But that is not the point...
...There is Dr...
...It is a common and usually easily curable type of cancer...
...Peace Council (affiliated with the World Peace Council, one of the more transparent Soviet fronts) did not, of course, need much urging from the Mobilization for Survival to change the emphasis of her medical advice...
...Bernard Lown, G. King, and whoever "Dzh...
...or that coal-fired plants release up to 50 times as much radioactivity as nuclear plants...
...Curiously, Gofman is probably the only leading antinuke who does not oppose nuclear bombs, but explicitly approves of them as effective weapons...
...its high incidence in Australia is not simply due to exposure to the sun- which is much greater in other countries-but to the lack of protective pigments in the skin of a white population living at low geographic latitudes, where the UV-absorbing layers of the atmosphere are thinner.] And so on-we are nowhere near the end of the nonsense in the one article from which the above was culled, let alone her numerous other prattlings...
...In itself, it is probably false...
...Yes, you read right: What this ex-scientist proved is that coal-fired plants burn less uranium than nuclear plants...
...Like Wald, the aforementioned Gofman is often considered more trustworthy because he has a degree not only in medicine, but also in physics-which only makes his distortions that much more bizarre...
...True, there are other considerations: reliability, economy, and the virtually unlimited domestic fuel supplies it can provide...
...It is debatable whether a man shouting "Fire...
...His interest was in medicine, not ideology...
...Similar sentiments were voiced in the same article by other American physicians, Prof...
...Most physicians of course have not studied the relative hazards of generating electric power, nor should they be expected to examine this somewhat esoteric issue...
...it produced its report two years later, and found what the British government, the Brookhaven National Laboratory, and every other serious scientist found...
...ciation, which had initially spoken out against nuclear power, re-examined the question at its San Diego meeting in February 1980 and unanimously reversed its previous stand...
...There remains, however, that small corps of antinuclear physicians...
...And there are many more doctors we lack the space for...
...Ignores the possibility of major accidents...
...Here is a little sample of the annual human price paid for the electric power produced by a standard (1,000 Petr Beckmann is professor of electrical engineering at the University of Colorado in Boulder and editor and publisher of the monthly Access to Energy...
...George Wald's statement that "every little bit of radioactivity hurts," though similar, is in a different class...
...Then there is Dr...
...Scientists interested in grants do not have to have a picture drawn out for them what kind of results are required by their sponsors...
...Even the Health Physics Society, which is dedicated to the study of radiation and to the protection of man and the environment against its harmful effects, has come out in favor of nuclear power...
...These figures are not unknown...
...quite obviously he shares responsibility for the only ill-effects on health that the Kemeny and other commissions investigating Three Mile Island could find-the severe mental stress of the population...
...The statement is, in a sense, true: There is indeed no known amount, just as there is no known amount of knee-bends that can be proclaimed impossible to produce heart attacks, or no known amount of arsenic that can be proclaimed safe in drinking water (both arsenic and radioactivity, however, do occur in drinking water, and the permissible amounts of both are standardized and regulated...
...Wald reveals only his political thinking when he charges that "scientists who attest to the safety of nuclear power have all been bought or that "these superb realists, the American insurance companies, refused to support nuclear plants from the beginning" or when he attributes the accident-free record of the U.S...
...Her speeches describe babies dying at the hospital where she used to work, victims of the radiation emitted by nuclear power plants...
...But strong as they may be, they have not persuaded those whose moral objections to the health hazards of nuclear power take precedence over all other considerations...
...In other matters, however, he is no less vicious than the antinukes without scientific training...
...Two weeks later, thousands more would die from what's called acute radiation sickness...
...it would be just as true to aver that the only reason why he has not yet been arrested for peddling heroin is that the evidence against him is, as of this writing, insufficient to guarantee conviction...
...We have one of the highest incidences of skin cancer in the world because we are exposed to the sun...
...they have simply been ignored...
...A tremendous amount of steam will be liberated...
...or that the lion's share of man-made radioactivity in the environment comes from medical equipment, including the radio-isotopes used in highly beneficial and lifesaving nuclear medicine...
...He opposes nuclear power, and he opposes fossil-fired power...
...It will blow the reactor container vessel apart and the radiation of a thousand Hiroshima-type bombs will escape...
...burn more uranium than a coal-fired plant...
...Each megawatt of nuclear electric capacity will significantly reduce-albeit not to zero-the health hazards that would be posed by a megawatt of fossil-fired- or hydro-power (let alone dilute, "soft" sources...
...Caldicott, who according to Izvestiya (July 30, 1980) visited Moscow as a member of the U.S...
...some is outright and dramatically false...
...As for fibrosis of the lungs, Wald has no direct way of knowing how much plutonium will cause fibrosis...
...The antinukes do not seriously dispute the fact that nuclear power reduces the health hazards of generating electricity...
...or that Coloradans are exposed to 5,000 nuclear plants' worth of radioactivity above the level they would receive in Florida (where the cancer incidence is more than twice as high...
...but his statements would be shocking even if they were not made by a Nobel Prize winner...
...Her allegations betray an ignorance not only of elementary physics and engineering ("If the cooling stops working, the whole reactor core melts right down through the botton of the reactor, half a mile into the earth...
...He does not approve of one form of "random murder" more than of another...
...like other such organizations, it not only disposes over abundant funds, but engages in the usual hypocrisy in choosing its name - "Physicians for Social Responsibility...
...nuclear navy to the fact that the navy "is not run for profit.'' This, after all, comes from a man who has embraced every cause of the radical Left, including a trip to Tehran to condemn the United States at a "human rights" conference organized by the Iranians while they were holding the American hostages...
...Thousands of people would die instantly...
...Indeed, the vast majority of informed medical opinion and its official organizations endorse nuclear power for its reduction of health hazards...
Vol. 14 • October 1981 • No. 10
